Determining a transportation plan to ship goods over a world-wide network involving many possible modes of transport (e.g., air, ocean, etc.) while minimizing costs and satisfying all constraints is a challenging task. For example, this may be challenging, in particular for a complex network containing many alternative routes, numerous existing freight documents for different modes of transport, and the fact that a user may expect transportation plan results in a relatively short period of time.
Multiple object types are relevant for determining connections in the system, e.g., schedules and different kinds of freight documents such as road freight orders, rail freight orders, air freight bookings and ocean freight bookings. Usually, different objects are stored in different database tables, which have separate access structures. In other words, the essential information relevant for the transportation capabilities is spread over multiple databases, which may contain much more information than needed. As such, conventional transportation planning mechanisms that access and search many different types of databases may be relatively slow and ineffective. In addition, each new type representing a possible connection must be accessed and integrated into the transportation planning logic separately.